The project was sponsored by The City and County of Swansea With the support of Carolyn bavies Advisor for the Arts.

MUSICAL LANDSCAPES

This project evolved from school visits to the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, The visits were felt to provide a very valuable experience to the children of Ysgol Crug Glas who have many physical and sensory difficulties that contribute to considerable problems in understanding the world and in making themselves understood.

Clearly children with a visual impairment would derive less from this predominantly visual experience. And so this was the starting point and stimulus for the project: to find a way of representing paintings through music, to record this music and make it available to the gallery visitors through sets of headphones. In this way pupils with a visual impairment could listen to a musical soundtrack that represented, in some way, images that were being viewed by other visitors to the gallery. This music could also be enjoyed by visitors who were able to see the images - allowing an enhanced experience to the gallery

The initial challenge was to find a way of communicating the context of the paintings to the participants in the project. If we took landscapes as our starting point, we could overcome this problem by bypassing the art work and going directly to the thing that it represents - the countryside itself. In this way it was agreed that we could visit locations in the countryside and hopefully carry the sounds and sensations experienced there, back to our music making sessions. While this seemed a useful and laudable idea, it was also problematic. Would the children connect their experience of being in countryside locations in any meaningful sense, with the business of creating music back in the school environment?

As the project developed, I started to think more broadly about the notion lf landscapes. Letting go of the more literal approach to representing in music the qualities of the countryside, or images in a landscape painting, I began to think of the musical improvisations of our sessions as ‘internal’ landscapes: musical contours which represent or reflect personal patterns of emotion and feeling.

Music therapist, Phil Tomkins, nominated eight children whom he knew to be fluent in the use of music. I worked with each one individually, and each session was also supported by a staff member, or by Phil himself. When Phil was present he contributed to the session by playing viola, keyboard, and percussion.

Phil’s support and presence in the sessions helped enormously in the smooth and effective development of the work and the project would not have been as successful without his contribution. As a result of his many years of work with the children at the school, Phil had a good knowledge of the ways in which the individuals would approach music making, which instruments they would like to play, how they would play them and how to approach music making with them in general.

The sessions took place over a period of five weeks and I had a total of sixteen sessions with the eight participants as well as two sessions with the whole group: one group session at school and one in a rural location. While it was fun having the whole group together in a session, we found that it was much more difficult to respond to each individual’s needs in this context and the musical playing was less focused and effective here. Individual sessions proved much more effective with these children, and a wide range of styles of playing emerged in the, from stormy and energised outbursts to reflective and delicate moments. All the sessions were recorded and at the end of the project I took the recordings to my music studio where I transferred them to the computer and was able to edit and mix them together.

The music making sessions were recorded on a Sony minidisc player. This small and unobtrusive recorder was ideal for these sessions as it provided high-level digital recording without drawing attention to itself. One limitation of the recorder, however, was its failure to adjust its recording levels quickly enough to accommodate sudden outbursts of playing. As a result some of these musical gestures (often some of the more exciting moments in our session) became distorted in the recording and could not be included in the finished piece. (I have since discovered that the minidisc player has a record level setting for higher level sounds and this might help to overcome this problem.)

In the final mix I also included environmental sounds that Clare Hobson had been using during her art sessions with the children. These included a range of environmental sounds such as rain, streams, thunder, and birdsong. I mixed these sounds together with the recording of the children at what seemed appropriate moments in the music. In this way the thunder bursts accompany moments of stormy playing, while the gentler streams or birdsong accompany more reflective playing.

I believe that the product of this project is both musically attractive and a good reflection of the musical styles of the participants involved.
The music making sessions were client-centred, encouraging the participants to play in whatever way they wanted to. Clearly a process of editing has taken place as it would not have been possible to include all of the music that was played. But what remains is a good representation of the music made in the sessions. Musical Landscapes represents a very effective model of work with children with special needs. By working predominantly in individual sessions, we were able to address the particular needs and concerns of each individual. The process of mixing the recordings together in the finished piece allows the material to have a public face in a finished product that represents the authentic playing of each person.

This model provides a useful balance between process and product. The sessions remain focused on the individual and his or her needs in the music session, while the recording of the sessions allows the presentation of aspects of that work to a broader public including school staff, parents, and other interested parties.

Pete Stacey BA PhD Dip Mus Th